


don't tell me what i feel

by morgaine_has_won



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/F, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, Self-Discovery, introspective work, psychological fic, same-sex attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 18:06:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13195653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgaine_has_won/pseuds/morgaine_has_won
Summary: Y'all are wrong about Sakura! ... In which Karin has to deal with some kind of hate boner. Title taken from my favourite part of Girls like Girls by Hayley Kiyoko. Homely, sweet, sexy, psychological, and mainly written as self-care.Originally inspired to deconstruct Sakura's character while indulging in sweet girl love. It's a stand-alone piece now but I intended to write more. Set in an unspecified time between ending and Gaiden. Vaguely canon-compliant but in a commentating way. So you could say anti-ending.





	don't tell me what i feel

**Author's Note:**

> written in Oct/2016

There is something about this Sakura that nestles itself into Karin's memory first time she properly meets her. There's nothing she can spot that explains the phenomenon, so she keeps narrowing her eyes ever so slightly when she is prompted to look at her, listen to her speak.

It's Suigetsu's halfhearted but nevertheless delightful needling about her stiffness being caused by jealousy of the unexpected development of Sasuke and Sakura's relationship that cements a kind of relational resistance inside her then. A building block on the way to effortless co-existence so to speak.

Because she is not jealous. At least she thinks so. But there is something about the girl that gives her pause and she has no grand fucking idea what it could be.

-

Working together with Sakura is a flawless, efficient dream that quickly turns into a well-oiled mechanism that Karin is happy to enter and leave behind by the schedule. Spending any other kind of time with her is bland, frivolous or nonsensically carefree.

-

Karin doesn't mix with Sasuke's business if she's not part of it, and nowadays she also doesn't persist in her frequent company of him. He does, though. He seeks them out. It usually involves spy work, which he either asks them to do or carries out with them.

It's them falling into old routines, believing in Sasuke and trusting him, as well as each other, that opens her heart every time. That involves never speaking about it though. There's a place deep inside her soul reserved for these moments when they complete a mission, or right in the middle of one, or whenever, when she's taken aback within with a sensation of 'Huh. This experience is worth it'. There's only one place left inside of her that lies deeper.

When Sasuke relies on her blindly, when he enters her personal space and tolerates her in his like he does with no one else, excluding maybe Juugo, it leaves her running on a pure affectionate desire for the remainder of the day. When their gazes meet and she reads an underlying concern, she feels her trust be well-placed.

One time when she witnesses him interact with Sakura she notices the lack of these inner movements and if Suigetsu was right this would bring her a feeling of immense satisfaction, she guesses.

It does plant a seed. A little sad one.

He looks at her like he doesn't trust her. But that's none of Karin's business.

-

Sakura leaves with Sasuke on a mission for the first time and when she comes back she's wearing a little pleased smile on her mouth. It irritates Karin, that one. Sasuke gives her an exhausted curl of the lips at their departure and lets her hug him sideways and there is something like a cold explosion inside Karin's chest at that. Maybe she is not as unaffected as she had thought. Still, a strangeness lingers in the exchange that doesn't follow Sasuke into their most recent hideout.

-

It's a cold evening in late October when the four of them set up their presumably last camp outside for the year. A grumpy Suigetsu complains about crazy continental climate, prompting Karin to threaten him with her assistance in transforming him into a more temperature-tolerant liquid form, and a hungry Sasuke munches three ration bars in quick succession as they wait for Juugo to reappear from his intelligence-gathering about the woods they have entered.

There's a ferret on his shoulder once he returns, causing Sasuke to pause in his chewing for a moment before swallowing in a big gulp. They all listen intently when Juugo passes on the information with his pleasant voice, a fondness in his eyes.

It's a routinized set-up and it's a plain old sleep that comes for Karin when she closes her eyes in that relaxed state.

-

She's wearing lime-green rubber gloves up to her elbows working a bunched-up rag over the ground of a rectangle metallic sink, cursing Suigetsu for shirking when the sucker was just as responsible for the mess as she was, sweating and bumping her fucking hip bones when there's a rapping of knuckles against the open metal door frame behind her.

It's Sasuke. He has a favour to ask.

"Now?", she snarls, holding up the ball of drenched cloth in a tight fist, dripping soap water on the floor.

His eyes seem to say it's important though, so she mutters whatever and lets the rag and the gloves fall into the sink with a wet and dull thump, not without putting some additional force into it, and follows him.

They go back to the main room, where there's a frequently over-filled round desk standing in the middle where they do most of the planning (or more like, Sasuke tells them their next course of action and they give him their input) and discussing of data. The amorphous wall on the south-east side of the room is made of a rough gray rock that opens for two low but wide windows, underneath which Sasuke takes a seat now on a bench-like window sill.

Karin remains standing at first, impatient, but when she notices that he's not letting himself be rushed, does sit down next to him. She lets her eyes wander over the opposing wall, a contrast of white plainness to this one, and after becoming aware of her tense breathing she lets go of the restlessness.

When she looks over, Sasuke is looking down at his hands with a thoughtful expression and that's a seldom thing to see, so she feels herself turn more towards him in curiousity.

"I want to try something and I need your help with that", he says. "It's not entirely fair of me to ask you, though." At that he's looking off to somewhere with a crinkle between his brows.

Karin blinks. "So, what is it." She wants him to spit it out now.

He looks her in the eye and just says: "I want you to kiss me."

At first her eyes widen slightly and her mouth goes a bit slack, but then her face is quickly taken over by a confused grimace. She leans over and gives him a peck on the mouth.

"Is that it?" she says after leaning back. She feels a stubbornness rise inside her.

There's a hint of annoyance in his face now. "No."

Their eyes lock in a battle of will for some time until Karin lets out a sigh and reaches up to her glasses. She considers telling him to ask Suigetsu, or better yet Juugo, and just going back to the stupid sink. But. A part of her doesn't really want to leave.

She can feel her palms getting sweaty and her heart rate picking up as she removes her glasses. She doesn't fight the blush rising up her cheeks or the slight shaking of her hands. She's not self-conscious about that in front of him.

As she scoots closer she finds his face is less blurry than their surroundings so near to hers. She looks into his eyes and sees that he's being genuine. A small epiphany forms in her mind as to why he asked this of her. "Close your eyes."

Then she gives in to the draw of his warm and beautiful chakra. She feels like an ocean closes over her head.

When she surfaces again, there's a cloud of sweet and gruesome thunder in her chest. She gives him a flat look before picking up her glasses and planting them on her nose again. Sasuke reciprocates her look pensively.

They share this moment of silence before Karin says, "I hope this helped you in some way."

Sasuke's expression clears up bit by bit. "It did."

-

Karin doesn't feel guilty for the episode until she's standing in a lab coat next to Sakura again. She figures that little experiment of Sasuke is not what real cheating looks like, and still she finds herself handling Sakura with a bit more care afterward. It might also be related to her suspicions about the reason for Sasuke's inquiry manifesting more and more solidly, and it's making her blood boil. She starts looking at Sakura with a mixture of sympathy and scorn. She hasn't forgotten those tears.

-

Sakura is standing next to her, they're passing utensils back and forth as well as a quiet well-worn exchange on what each of them is about to do that trickles down a roughly two-hour period when something inside Karin snaps awake and becomes aware of how used to Sakura she has become in their partner work.

Her mind slips out of the synchronization and she misses her cue, her body half-way turning to the other, making Sakura pause and look up at her.

Karin just looks back for some time, caught in a stupor. Something's rattling and working in her mind, but she can't identify what it is that is happening in there.

"Is something the matter, Karin-san?"

Sakura's voice manages to focus her on the present again. Presently in front of her are two quite turquoise, quite _familiar_ eyes that hold a concerned look. There are things going on inside her while she just perceives, and they might not only be going on in her mind, but they just as well could be concealed behind a curtain because the only thing that Karin notices is a strange buzz filling her up.

A hand touches her shoulder and ends the moment.

Karin blinks, slowly, looks down, then up, then turns towards the counter again and resumes her work.

She can feel how Sakura's eyes are still on her and she can well imagine the contemplative look she might wear. But then Sakura rejoins her and it's work as usual, commentary and all.

It's only near the end of their schedule when Karin takes a bathroom break that her head regurgitates a product of that experience. The white tiles and the quiet and privacy give her a sense of ease and a tenderly silent thought emerges along with the image of Sakura's eyes from before.

_They're really pretty..._

Taken aback Karin remains in one position, unmoving, unthinking.

Then she finishes her business and moves to the clean white sink to wash her hands. She just lets the thought sit there without trying to do anything with it.

Then she exits the room.

-

It is kind of the last straw when Karin wakes up in the middle of the night, immensely bothered by a flurry of fluttering images and strange sensations that penetrate her mind.

In between the pounding in her ears, she can still feel the haunting last touches of the dream. She waits for her heart beat to slow and her breathing to calm down before she lies back and groans. The penny has dropped, and how.

With her eyes open in the dark, she fiddles with a knobbly corner of the blanket that partially covers her. Letting her eyes rest on the layered shadows in the room. Listening to the low hum of the heating system that is sometimes interrupted and sometimes interspersed with barely there prickly staccatos.

Weird. The Sakura she first met and spent many hours working with and the Sakura of her dream don't seem to be the same person, somehow. On the one hand there's a pretty plain but highly competent young woman in a white coat, who Karin can't talk to out of duty for longer than fifteen minutes before the slightly disharmonious voice and the emphatically cute smile give her a headache. Then there's ... well.

Karin can feel her blood rushing faster again, spreading a warmth inside her body into the very last cell, as visions of comfortable nude closeness and a relaxed smile, soft but firm freckled skin, strong but light muscles flattered by elegant and adorable fat tissue rise up inside her consciousness. Her eyelids grow heavy while she thinks about admiring small rounded breasts of rosy colour, moving her hand to touch them carefully.

As if it is inevitable she reluctantly slides her right hand down her stomach to the hem of her night shorts. Pausing at first, but then being tugged at by the feeling of sweet arousal, she cups herself between the legs, only to be shook rudely by a loud _bang_ going off somewhere in the building.

Deeply annoyed by the interruption, Karin slams her glasses on and violently throws back the covers, practically flies to her door in rage, unlocks it and stomps down the hallway plus subsequently the stairs to where the light still glares out of the kitchen. Only in her night wear, with bare feet, she stops just outside the doorway with a heaving chest, seething, and with a pang of the humiliation inside her ribcage that only the sudden daylight, artificial or not, can cast on such clandestine thoughts and activities as hers a minute before.

Trying to gather the contents of a leftover meal from the ground with a paper towel, a wide open fridge behind him, crouches Suigetsu in a squat.

He seems completely unbothered to have just caused a ruckus that would be enough to startle a whole village of shinobi awake, and even lets the bin fall shut without dampening the noise as if it's not three in the fucking morning. It's only when he straightens up from picking up the pot and lid with a bored expression that his eyes fall on Karin and he promptly lets them fall again. _Bang_.

"Geez, Karin, what are you standing there in the shadow like a creep", he admonishes her in a drawl, and not in an inside voice.

Stalking inside, Karin can just keep herself from crushing her own teeth by grinding them while pointedly reaching for the door to demonstratively shut it behind her. Then she swishes around and advances on him with an almost comically strangled, impossibly expressive whisper tone.

"You sound funny when you try to scream at me without screaming", Suigetsu notes with an amused expression, looking delighted even though he's holding the lid of the pot between them like a shield. "Huh? I have no idea what you just said."

In a static tension that seems to extend into her hair, Karin shows a terrifying ill-fitting smile. "Let me _show you_." Somehow she has procured the pot that matches his lid, making Suigetsu eye it a bit warily. "You-"

She makes a dash for his lower abdomen, only for him to block her in a blink with an ear-ringing _clang_. She glowers at his grin for a moment only for that face to be violently forked through by a wide outwards movement of her arm, the offending item landing in the far kitchen corner to her right in a clatter, by far the loudest noise that night.

Suigetsu is grinning when his dripping head is reforming itself. "You were saying?"

Arms crossed, Karin bellows, "Forget it! And clean your fucking shit up!" Then she looks right past him and struts to the fridge, but instead of closing it right away spends some time choosing a flavored yoghurt.

She picks sesame.

"Aww, and here I thought you were gonna go for strawberry, Karin!"

Karin ignores him, grabs a tea spoon out of one of the drawers and leans back against the counter before digging into her midnight snack. With a tired and irritable expression she observes him from her vantage point while he finishes up cleaning in record time. She eyes the strip of kitchen floor he leaves behind suspiciously. "Now what are you implying there, idiot" is her comment, knowing it probably won't be anything flattering. She's prepared to snap.

"Well," and now there's something else in his eyes besides the mocking twinkle, maybe a trace of curiousity. "No one else here spends that much time on the Sakura girl."

Karin is stunned for a moment, not having expected anything of the sort. Slowly she resumes leading the spoonfuls of gray yoghurt to her mouth, her eyebrows drawing together. "What are you talking about, I work with her", she says around a mouthful.

Suigetsu's face gains a lazily reckoning quality at that. "Yeah. An awful lot. Even I can see that you could work alone if you wanted and just brief her." Karin pauses for a bit upon hearing that. "You're not one for sensibilities, even around actual girls."

The jab at her has just left his lips when Karin crushes the little yoghurt container in her fist. "Shut up, imbecile! And don't you be talking about sensibilities like you own one shred of damn sophistication!"

He emulates his best schoolmasterly expression then. "Ah ah ah, but I most definitely can be damn intellectual. I'm wicked smart and have one keen sense of observation." He wriggles his finger at her and then grins like a cheshire cat. "I could teach an entire classroom on how to classify hellish beasts, starting with you as example."

And that seals Suigetsu's fate of spoon-centered doom, for Karin descends on him in her fury, murderous aura and all.

-

A newly found awareness can make a person more relaxed and laid back, or make life harder. Karin is feeling both reflects her situation. She's finding this attraction a nuisance, an intruder on her, with no direction to point to and clearly say: This is what's going to come of this. Evidently born out of chance, it doesn't seem to hold a tie to her, she can only follow it all the way back to Sakura.

So she rests in herself in the moments it strikes, keeps on working, can't help but snort sometimes when thoughts of Sakura's buttocks cross her mind without warning but definitely with incentive, and even meets the novel experience of girl love with a sense of curiousity.

Guiltlessly indulging perverted fantasies about the object of her desire has undoubtedly become harder, almost as if she's reluctant to lay a finger on Sakura's honor. However, Karin is glad such a pastime hasn't taken over her mind, as it helps her keep the strings neatly in order. Starting to get confused with this like a moron is the last thing she wants.

Even if it presents a challenge, even if there is a bothersome quality to it, Karin continues her team effort with Sakura.

Despite what Suigetsu may think, her involvement is solely inspired by the good partnership they have going on, and has been from the start. But she would be lying if she pretended not wanting to get to the bottom of this.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are very welcome. seriously, i'd love to hear your thoughts on it so you don't have to be shy..


End file.
